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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I'd call Pendolino a dead end? From Wikipedia: "Pendolino is an Italian family of tilting trains used in Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the UK, Switzerland and China."

In Finland, they seemed to have had a lot of problems with the tilting mechanism in the winter, so new digital hydraulics system was developed for that. Digital hydraulics is a fun concept by the way.

Sources: https://community.boschrexroth.com/t5/Rexroth-Blog/New-hydra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Sm3

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Finnish pendolinos have been running with the tilting mechanism permanently off for felt 10 years.

Well, the info says digital tilting hydraulics was tested 2013-2015 without faults and VR decided to install it on all trains. Couldn't find newer info.

I might have been wrong that the tilting mechanism has been completely disabled. A web search turned out only that it has been limited: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7047961

And a press release by the railway company from 2011 says that the higher speed enabled by the tilting is no longer reflected in the timetables https://www.vrgroup.fi/fi/vrgroup/uutishuone/uutiset-ja-tied... I would say that has not changed afterwards.

Either way, travelling slower through the curves has stopped the wobbly feeling for the passengers. So in practice the tilting has been a dead end in real life for the Finnish railways. Even if I did not really follow the argumentation in the article why tilting is a dead end.

The original post also says

> The Pendolino itself is a fine product, with the tilt removed. Alstom uses it as its standard 250 km/h train, at lower cost than 350 km/h trains. It runs in China as CRH5, and Poland bought a non-tilting Pendolino fleet for its high-speed rail service.

I guess this is a reference to "New Pendolino" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pendolino), one of the most recent versions of the train which omits the tilting.

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